


The History of the Aesir

by what_alchemy



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Colonialism, Cultural Differences, Incest, Jotunn Biology (Marvel), M/M, No Infinity War, Other, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pregnancy, Pregnancy Kink, i'm not kidding about choosing not to warn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 13:06:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13147341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: "This Thor niggles at Loki like a forgotten word on the tip of the tongue, like a tooth hanging by a stubborn thread, like the skin around a wound that refuses to die."orLoki gets a hobby.





	The History of the Aesir

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sisabet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisabet/gifts).



> If I could put CHOOSE NOT TO WARN in big flashing lights, I would. This is your third and final warning about the lack of warning.
> 
> Merry Friendmas, Sisabet. This cost me nothing but almost two months of brainstorming, a vacation’s worth of writing days, and all the conversations we could have had about Loki that we didn’t because otherwise all the thoughts and feels that went into this fic would have come tumbling out and everything would have been ruined. 
> 
> So. It's everything you ever wanted, I know. Blame GhostTownExit.

There are 1289 Aesir aboard the ship dubbed _the Frigga_. By the end of the first week, Thor knows the name of each of his subjects. He has listened to them, wept with them, clasped each of them by the arm and promised a future of stability and security. He has dried tears and restored hope. He serves, and is served gratefully in return.

This is the manner of king Loki’s brother is.

—

Thor refuses to say, but Loki knows they are headed for Midgard. They could settle in Vanaheim or Alfheim where they would want for nothing, where they could live out their long days amid the comfort of those realms, in rich and sumptuous lands among people with equally long lives, but Thor has stopped heeding him.

“Even though your little pets will be dust and bone long before this ship ever makes landfall?” Loki asks one night in their shared rooms. The thought of Midgard and all its seething mortality tightens his skin, makes him itch. He feels like a vicious dog, and he stretches his magic just enough to sharpen his teeth when he sneers, a glint in the low light of the captain’s quarters. 

“You should find something with which to occupy your time, brother,” Thor says. “Knitting, perhaps—you have such flair.” He slips out of his tunic, turns his back to shuck his leathers and underthings. One step and he is on Loki’s side of the room, nude and smiling though Loki can no longer divine all his secrets from a glance. He claps Loki’s shoulder and, sour, Loki forces himself to be as stone beneath the touch. “It will be a long journey.”

Thor saunters back to his side and slips into bed. In moments he is snoring, and Loki is left to stare at the ceiling. He imagines it crumbling to reveal the secret history of his brother the stranger.

This Thor niggles at Loki like a forgotten word on the tip of the tongue, like a tooth hanging by a stubborn thread, like the skin around a wound that refuses to die.

—

Food and water are rationed, gardens are built to cultivate modest crops, and the ship even has its own small complement of fowl and boar. No one will go hungry or want for nourishment, but Thor insists upon strict discipline to keep them that way. There is no drink but for rare celebrations, and Loki finds the sobriety of the ship’s denizens both foreign and boring.

It is when he makes to steal into the stores in order to making something _interesting_ happen that he discovers Brunnhilde on rotation as guard of food storage, and Loki finds himself flat on his back with a smirking Valkyrie looming over him.

“My brother is more simple-minded than I thought,” he says, “to employ you as protection for the only casks of ale and mead at our disposal.”

Her boot bores into his clavicle. 

“Funny,” she says, “I thought the same when he decided to sleep beside a snake and a sorcerer.”

When Loki bares his teeth, even he doesn’t know if it’s a smile or a threat.

“Tell me, princeling,” Brunnhilde says. “Why do you not simply conjure all we need for feasts and making merry? Why not make me and the others who stand guard redundant with the plenty that’s surely at your fingertips?”

“That’s not how magic works,” he says. “Satiation would be but an illusion, and in the end we’d blow away, nothing but husks hollowed by hunger and thirst.”

Brunnhilde removes her boot and Loki springs to his feet, careful to keep a healthy distance.

“And yet you would steal from our stores for your own enjoyment.”

“Just a touch of fun,” Loki says. “No one will suffer when the mead is gone, save for you.”

Brunnhilde rolls her eyes.

“As selfish and small a princeling as I’ve ever seen.”

Loki snorts.

“What are you on about?” he says. “You, the last remaining Valkyrie, self-exiled in a fit of cowardice long before Thor was ever born, before I was purloined from the ice like a war crime. You know nothing of princes. You know nothing of _us_.”

She laughs then, a cruel and mocking thing Loki instantly adores.

“How curious,” she says, sweeping her hands outward. “A prince of the realm, so ignorant of his own history. I suppose you thought you invented being a prince, hmm?” She stalks toward him and he holds his ground. He can feel her breath when she says, “I was there when Ymir presented Búri proudly to the court as his heir.” She reaches up and sweeps the hair from his forehead, gentler than he could have imagined. “I was there millenia later when Búri fell and his son Borr took the throne like a burden.” A thumb sweeps across Loki’s cheekbone, and his heart thuds loudly in the deepest parts of himself. “I was there when Odin, ambitious with blood on his teeth, wrested Gungnir from his father’s grasp and granted him the rest he dearly longed for.” Loki’s breath is quick and hot. “And Hela was a prince, a king, a god as surely as any of her fathers before her.”

Brunnhilde steps back, and Loki sees in her face untold millenia of war and fealty.

“You, Loki Liesmith, are the one who knows nothing of princes.”

She resumes her place before the stores and stares sightlessly ahead. Loki feels like a gnat before a giant.

“Who was her mother?” he dares ask after minutes pass like winter honey. “Who was _she_?”

Brunnhilde makes no answer, and Loki burns.

—

Thor is already half undressed and washing his face when Loki storms into their quarters and stabs him.

“Damn you!” Thor bellows, and flings the knife away. He kicks at Loki’s shins, but Loki steps back as he would for a dance. It’s been so long they’ve been dancing. So long with him, and Thor, and a knife between them.

“Did you know?” Loki demands. “Did you keep it from me all this time?”

“What are you on about?”

Thor’s hair is growing back, but it’s at an awkward stage, falling into his eyes and over his ears. He pushes it away with bloody fingers and scowls at Loki through the fringe.

“Hela,” Loki says. “You and your father. Conspiring to keep all your secrets from me.”

Thor turns away and sighs, looking at himself in the mirror as Loki watches. He wonders what Thor sees there: a reflection of the All-Father, one-eyed and weary? All their fraught history? Frigga?

“You know as much as I,” he says. “And you know that. Spare me, for one night, all your bile about Odin, who was as much your father as he was mine.”

“Perhaps he was my father, but I was never his child. Not like you.”

Thor dabs at the flesh wound Loki has gouged into his side. He throws the bloody rag at Loki’s face, and Loki sends it sailing into Thor’s bed.

“Peace, brother,” Thor says. “If nothing else, we are both the sons of Frigga.”

“By the Norns, will you not _fight me?_ ”

Thor’s smile is melancholy. The expression is strange on him.

“No,” Thor says. “And nor will I allow you to pour all your ire into me in Father’s absence. He’s gone, brother. You must find a way to live with that.”

Loki’s eyes prick even as his heart falls into the deep of his stomach. Thor has already turned away and doffed the lights on his side of the room. Loki sees a flash of his bare arse just before it’s covered by the bedding, and he looks firmly away, a knot thickening in his throat.

“Heimdall has a free bunk in his quarters if you cannot countenance my company any longer,” he says. 

Loki looks in the mirror. He is blue in the swallowing dark of the room. As blue as any Aesir who catches sight of himself by moonlight alone. He closes his eyes.

“Do you think Mother knew?” he asks.

The silence is so long, Loki thinks Thor must have fallen asleep. But then,

“I don’t know. I used to think she knew everything, but…I do not know.”

Loki does not prostrate himself to hated Heimdall, and he does not crawl as an insect into the stores, and he does not carve his brother up in a fit of pique. He undresses, and folds himself into bed, and wishes for a simpler time, when he climbed into Thor’s bed with impugnity, when he settled himself at his side and was happy to be ignorant of all that was to come.

—

A woman, Dagmar, who once tended the orchards of Iðunn, announces she is with child. Spirits lift across the ship, and Thor orders a feast in her honor.

Loki sits at Thor’s side and makes merry along with everyone else. He eats and eats, and still he feels hollow. He wonders what it is to feel the spark of life deep inside, to grow a being like an apple, whole and sweet. He wishes, wildly, that he was Frigga with Thor nestled safely in her womb; that he, Loki, was the germ inside her that crawled screaming into the realm eternal, destined for and worthy of her love; that he was, somehow, the mother of monsters, the likes of which had never been seen in all the realms. 

He plummets abruptly back into himself and finds Thor staring at him, head cocked. Thor’s hand lands on his knee, and heat blooms like lightning across Loki’s skin.

—

Loki asks Thor where the most learned scholar on the ship resides. Thor blinks his single eye at him like a dullard until Loki scoffs and says, “Other than me.”

“Ah,” Thor says. “Speak with Vidar, who was once the purveyor of libraries in the Halls of Knowledge. He keeps quarters near Dagmar and Kjell.” 

“How do you know him and I don’t?”

Thor laughs and clasps his hand behind Loki’s neck, hauling him in. Loki stumbles, helpless against the onslaught of his brother’s affections. Loki forgets, sometimes, how immense Thor is, how strong. 

“Be not so aggrieved, brother,” Thor says. “The Halls of Knowledge were vast, and their scholars many. Go—perhaps you’ll make a friend.”

—

Loki does not make a friend.

Vidar is stooped, but he has the look of many Aesir elders: once-tall, fair and rosy-cheeked, long white hair held back from the face by a leather cord. What is novel is the pair of spectacles perched on his nose, and he peers over them suspiciously when Loki appears at his door.

“Your majesty,” he says. His voice is as worn as his gnarled hands.

“Vidar, is it?”

“Hmph.”

“I was hoping to trouble you for some information.”

“No trouble at all for my prince, I’m sure.” His expression is sour and curdles his words.

Loki puts on a winning smile.

“But of course,” he says, “I am eager to speak with one as venerable in knowledge as the great Vidar. Surely, you know more than anyone now living what the Halls of Knoweldge held. I have my particular interests, yes, but I do hope you’ll favor me with any facts and theories known to you, and in exchange… perhaps I can make you a window? Your beloved homestead, but a memory no longer, the sight of it flourishing to keep you warm on this long journey?”

It is not his finest work, he knows.

Vidar’s jaw works through the sneer threatening to take over the lines of his face.

“I know you, Loki, son of Odin,” he says. “And I will not be flattered or bribed by the god of lies.”

“Please,” Loki says then. “Please.”

“What is it?”

Loki has many questions, but the moment is delicate and threatens to shatter beyond repair. It can bear only one query. Blundering is for Thor, and Loki is light on his feet—but he is out of practice, hurtling through space on a ship where no one wishes to speak to him.

“Hela,” he says. “Tell me of her. Who her mother was. How she grew into what she was.”

Vidar does not open the door. 

“You ask for memory, not scholarship,” Vidar says. “And that, my prince, I do not owe you.”

“Were there no history books bearing her name? Were there no cautionary tales of the All-Father’s missteps?”

Vidar opens the door further only to stand in the jamb and force himself to rise to his full height. He crosses his arms before him.

“You think you know what shame is, Odin’s son,” he says. “You think your deeds make you a low and unworthy thing. But you are young yet on these ancient branches, and you know not what horrors are to come.”

He steps back and closes the door with deafening force. Loki stares at the great slab of metal—he could blast through, rummage through the filthy ruins of Vidar’s mind until he gets all he seeks and more, until Vidar is nothing but a twitching pulp on the cold deck—but he balls his fists at his sides, closes his eyes, and knows, _knows_ what shame is.

—

On nights when Thor remains occupied with the state of his people or the state of his ship, Loki steals into his bed to toss about languorously in bedding that smells of him. He grows hard against the sheets, blood throbbing low in his loins, a completed circuit of hot pleasure between cock and hole.

He’s seen Thor in all his naked splendor too much and too often. He knows exactly how big he is, how great his glory would grow at full flag. How full he would feel inside him. Loki scoops a generous dollop of ungent onto his fingers and rubs his hole, a tease at first, and then more firmly until the muscle gives beneath his ministrations and he can ease a finger—two, and then three—inside. He presses his face into Thor’s pillow even as he twists his fingers against the smooth walls of his arse, and he gasps at the starbursts that light his body when he grazes the firm gland inside. His hole clamps down on his fingers and he aches to feel the full weight of his brother atop him, splitting him open with his cock. He wants to be full of Thor, to burst with him, to overflow with him. He wants to grow large and round with Thor’s leavings, wants Thor to suckle at his leaking breasts, wants Thor to grasp him by the hair and force him to meet his gaze, wants Thor to say, “Loki,” wants Thor to say, “brother,” wants Thor to say, “be ever by my side,” as he spills inside him.

These nights, Loki spends spectacularly across Thor’s sheets. In the half-light of dozing, impossible children crowd him, pawing at him for attention. Thor is there, bright and beautiful. Frigga is there. Odin is there. Laufey is there.

And Hela.

—

Loki goes to Dagmar, who is only just burgeoning into her dress. He brings her a tarte made with preserves and berries plucked ripe from their bushes. She sheds a few tears, and her husband says, gruffly, “the hormones, you know.” Loki nods as if he could possibly know.

“What brings a prince to our door today?” Dagmar asks, setting a slice of the tarte before Loki, and a bigger slice for herself. Kjell waves off his portion, and smiles to see her push it onto her own plate.

“I wished merely to offer my sincere congratulations,” he says. “A child is a cause for joy for us all.” 

Dagmar beams up at him, full of thanks. He straightens and plasters on his public smile for her. He peers, surreptitious, at the press of her belly against the fabric of her dress. The Aesir, never a prolific people, have always been slow to reproduce, and Loki has rarely had cause or opportunity to keep the company of a pregnant woman. He wants to dissect her. He wants to lift the babe into his arms and feel what it means to create life. Burn or build—he never knows which impulse is stronger.

“Tell us, won’t you, if there is ever anything we can do for you?”

“You and the king are so kind,” she says, “so generous.”

Loki’s smile begins to hurt.

“The king and I,” he says. “We live to serve.”

—

He comes back again and again. Sometimes the sweets he brings are small, sometimes they are large. Her face brightens when she sees him, and after a time, she comes to anticipate his knock on her door, and has some manner of tea steeped and anecdote to share. He has never had so gentle an ongoing interaction with someone. He wonders if it will last.

When she is laid low by unrelenting nausea, he fashions her a window, not into space but into her own memory. The sun, rising and falling over the orchards. Apples, budding, ripening, falling. A clear and endless autumn. 

He remembers Asgard, too.

—

Loki spends long hours looking in the mirror, distorting the image so his belly matches Dagmar’s. A silken spill of black hair flourishes down his back, and modest breasts push tender into the confines of his tunic. Dagmar will be pregnant for years, while Loki will remain hatefully fallow. Today, it feels real, the way his nipples tighten, the way his innards clench.

He can see his breath.

He glances down the flat plane of his stomach. His hands are blue. His gaze snaps back to the mirror, where he is lush and gravid and pink. The mirror shatters, and the blood on his hands, his own blood, is as red as any Aesir’s.

—

Loki is a ball under the furs of his bedding when Thor returns late. The shards of the mirror have been swept into a bin but not disposed of. In the heat and darkness of his cocoon, Loki is attempting not to fly apart.

Through the layers, a sharp poke lands unerringly on Loki’s rump. He yelps.

“What are you doing in there, brother?” Thor asks. “What happened to the mirror?”

“I am unwell,” Loki says, muffled. “Leave me.”

Thor does no such thing. Loki can hear him and the leisurely manner with which he brushes his teeth, kicks off his boots, flings his clothes in every direction. Drives Loki mad. 

“I will call for Freyja,” he says from his side of the quarters. “Now, do you think, or can you wait til the morning?”

There is no morning in space. Just the endless dark. The ship and her automated light systems force a sense of time on them. Already Loki has had to conjure more than three hundred illusions in the form of windows before picturesque landscapes with predictable horizons for those who may fall to despair without the comfort of the lie. He checks or changes each one on a methodical weekly rotation. They—and Dagmar, Thor, the longing and the horror—keep him occupied.

“Time isn’t real,” he grumbles, and Thor answers with a gusty sigh.

“Well, your illness is, so you’ll submit to the healer and not infect anyone else on this ship.”

“It is not contagious.”

“Oh, are you a healer now? Whenever did you find time to apprentice at the academy?”

“The treatment is _to be alone_ ,” Loki says.

Thor yanks Loki’s furs back and Loki scowls up at the light that refracts around his bulk.

“I am finished with my callow youth,” Thor says, “and I can look back upon my mistakes with a jaundiced eye. You have always thought me a fool, Loki, but you are the fool if you think I will let ever let you suffer and seethe alone again.”

Loki imagines this is how a block of ice feels when it cracks in two. Or a frost giant.

“None from Asgard-that-was can help me,” he says. “Leave me, Thor.”

Thor sets a big hand on Loki’s forehead. 

“You are warm,” he says, “and you look…odd.”

“Ever the flatterer.”

Thor sits on the edge of Loki’s bunk and Loki can see Frigga in his face, in his bearing. He squeezes his eyes shut and turns away even as Thor brushes the hair from his forehead.

“There is someone,” Thor says, and pauses. The hands leave him, and Loki cracks one eye to peer at his brother. Thor is staring, brow furrowed, into some invisible middle distance. 

“Someone.”

Thor cocks his head, and the sharpness in his single eye makes something inside Loki quiver.

“Someone who lived through the conquests,” he says. “Someone who will know what maladies a Jötunn might endure.” 

Breath rises like steam from Loki’s lungs. He grinds his teeth and shudders against the cold.

“Who,” he says.

“Brunnhilde.”

Loki turns over to face the bulkhead. 

“You leave your back exposed,” Thor says. A hand settles between his shoulder blades and rubs gentle circles into Loki’s skin.

“You’re too soft to stab me in it,” Loki says.

“I’ll summon her.”

Loki wonders how many Jötnar she has personally escorted into whatever afterlife awaits frost giants. Hopefully enough to make it quick.

—

Brunnhilde arrives in her everyday armor rather than her special occasion armor.

“Do you own a dress?” Loki asks. “A tunic?”

“Leathers,” she says, and tears his mountain of furs away. “But you’ve not earned the privilege of beholding me in their glory.”

“I am your prince,” Loki says, petulant, but she only snorts.

“I trust in your discretion on this matter,” Thor says.

“My tongue is not given to wagging, my king,” Brunnhilde says. Her gaze rakes down Loki’s body as his shivering grows more violent. He cannot fathom her expression. She leans in and snaps her fingers centimeters before his nose. He blinks and blinks. She jostles him by the shoulder.

“Hey,” Thor says, stepping closer. “Don’t damage him too much.”

“You said he was Jötnar.”

“He is.”

She fills Loki’s field of vision. Her features run together like watercolors.

“You, sorcerer,” she says. “Take off your glamor.”

“I don’t have one?” he says.

She draws back only to tug at his tunic. It comes open at her touch, exposing Loki’s chest. His nipples are swollen and sore, and he whimpers. Thor makes a bizarre squeaking sound. When Loki blinks blearily down his body, he sees a pair of small, pale breasts, rosy-tipped and shocking. He gasps and passes a damp hand over them. They burn and ache to touch.

“New, I take it?” Brunnhilde asks.

“They weren’t there yesterday,” Thor says, voice strangled.

Brunnhilde grunts and throws the furs back over Loki without finesse. He hisses at the drag on his nipples. They feel as though they may burst.

“It is a Jötunn’s ailment, but that is not a Jötunn’s body,” she says.

“It is,” Thor says. “ _He_ is. My father found him in an ice floe, blue as a field of cornflowers. He turned pink at Odin’s touch, so he brought him home to us and then I had a brother.”

“A wrong-colored runt, then. With hair, and now—” She shook her head, eyebrows raised. “—tits. Of all things.”

There is silence, and Loki glances out from his nest to find the two of them engaged in a staring contest. Thor breaks it.

“What. Is. The ailment.” 

Brunnhilde shifts her weight and licks her lips. Loki can see the twitch of her mandible.

“Jötunheim’s seasons are long,” she says at last. “Centuries may pass between one and the next.”

“And…”

“And for many creatures of the realms, from gods to insects, there comes the season of plenty.”

Thor’s lips part, and he looks down at Loki with his brows drawn together as if he’s never seen him before.

“I never—” Thor’s voice is faint and distant, and Loki wants to laugh. “I never saw a lady of Jötunheim, much less one with child.”

“You misunderstand,” Brunnhilde says, impatience in her voice. “There are no ladies of Jötunheim. There are no men of Jötunheim. There are only the Jötnar, and the changing of the seasons.”

Thor clenches his fist and dents the bulkhead with a great swing that reminds Loki of times past. Brunnhilde doesn’t flinch.

“Speak plain, Valkyrie,” he says. “We are warriors, not bards spinning riddles for the court.”

“Perhaps—” Brunnhilde’s jaw snaps shut before the words can escape. Loki can hear her swallow around them. “Perhaps,” she tries again, softer this time, “you need only find a way to ease him through this. A companion. Someone he favors. Someone who won’t get a child on him when he is not in a state to be rational about it.”

Loki quails, even as his prick rises to meet the furs at her words. A heavy slickness throbs at its base, and vigor rattles his spine. He feels as though he could swallow Yggdrasil to the roots and then birth the universe anew. He screws his eyes shut, but he can feel Thor’s gaze on him. Minutes pass as Thor and Brunnhilde whisper furiously at each other by the door, but finally Brunnhilde leaves, and Loki’s bunk sinks under Thor’s weight.

“Tell me what to do, Loki,” Thor says, rubbing heat into Loki’s shoulders. “Tell me—” He swallows thickly, his breath coming too quick. “—tell me who you would choose for this honor.” 

Loki’s eyes snap open and he scowls. The lights have dimmed, and Thor has never looked more beautiful, or more like a king. He smells heady and strong. Intoxicating. Loki’s eyes and heart are full of him, and there is no hiding it.

“Damn you, Thor,” Loki says. “Leave me to this and forget me.”

“You’ll not die of this, brother,” Thor says, and those damnable hands are back in his hair, too gentle. “It will go quicker if you have someone.”

“You would call me brother,” Loki says, “even now? Even as I disgrace you, and your people, and this ship?”

Thor says nothing, but leans down and breathes deeply of the crown of Loki’s head.

“Ours is a long history,” he says, “and it is far from written.”

He presses his lips to Loki’s eyes, and Loki moans, unbidden. Thor overtakes him, the furs pushed aside, Loki and his aching prick arched helplessly against him. There is a new space just beneath his cock, teeming with slick desire, screaming its emptiness, but Loki wants Thor in the deepest core of himself and begs him to oblige. Thor pushes in slowly, the picture of concentration as sweat beads upon his brow, but Loki is impatient. He bears down, hands scrabbling desperately at Thor’s back, and he forces Thor all the way inside. He cries out against the stretch and burn, but Thor shudders and sobs, pressing his face into Loki’s neck as if he has never felt a relief so great as the give of Loki’s hole to his prick. 

Loki has never loved him so much, even when he was destroying him.

—

Days later, the urgency in his blood abates, the tender little tits disappear, and Loki is sore in a way that makes him feel smug. Thor is gone, but has left him a store of grapes and water, which Loki imbibes greedily. Afterward he sinks back into his bunk and pulls the furs around him.

He is alone in this body—wombless and flat—and he cannot know when the season of plenty will come upon him again. But he thinks of the way Thor came inside him, a flood of awe, and instead of despair he feels triumph. 

Loki allows himself to spin the fantasy of a contented life surrounded by scads of children, alternately tow- and raven-haired, playfighting with wooden swords and practicing magic under blue sky and soft cloud. Thor laughing, catching his eye, dragging him back to their rooms for satiation.

It’s not at all what he wants, not really. The pastoral would bore him to death, and he and Thor would kill each other, and the children would be tiny, angry balls of neuroses, and maybe some of them would fall in love with each other to everyone’s consternation, and Loki-Mother would have to tell them how disappointed in them he was, and then maybe he would like one better than the rest and give her a kingdom while the rest grew only cold and blue and dead-eyed.

Loki scoffs, pressing a hand to the space below his navel. Happiness, he thinks, should be at least a little spoiled. He’s the one it’s happening to, after all. He turns over to press his nose into the pillow, still redolent with Thor’s sweat. 

He modifies the fantasy: one child. Dark hair. Blue eyes. Magic and a wide, guileless embrace. Maybe their people would forgive him his love of Thor if this is the future he conjures with it. 

But Loki knows the truth beneath the dream: he is but the wind howling down a mountain.

—

There are countless problems with being trapped among the scions of a once-great race now hurtling through space on whatever was available at the time. The temperature controls: often malfunctioning. The boars: making the living quarters near them loud and malodorous. The interpersonal friction: neighbors who hated each other on Asgard hate each other still, only now they share bulkheads and a corridor. And so on, and on, and on. In fact there is no end to the problems the ship and her occupants may encounter.

Thor occupies himself day and night with these problems, even after such a momentous event as Loki’s season of plenty, and thus he is absent from their quarters while Loki, though excessively pleased with himself, remains too weak and exhausted to go about his usual daily business. Stuck in their quarters with naught but some grapes and furs, the problem Loki laments most in the moment is the dearth of books. 

It is not the first time on this journey he has longed for the weight of a tome in his lap, but right now the lack of it is excrutiating. The last of the citizens of Asgard boarded the _Frigga_ with nothing but the clothes hanging from their bodies, and sometimes barely that. The Halls of Knowledge, and all the lofty academies and institutions of scholarship to which they were connected, are cinders now. If cinders even survived the confrontation between Death and Flame.

Books were Loki’s first friends. His only friends, he’d long believed. The idea of this journey stretching on for decades or even centuries without the comforting benefit of even one book threatens to fill Loki with a miasma of rage and despair. 

Before he can shatter another mirror, there comes a knock at the door. He frowns, but calls out to the visitor that he’ll be just a moment. He conjures something tasteful with which to cover his nudity and dishevelment, and he arranges himself elegantly at the table before activating the computer to open the door.

It’s Dagmar—through the door belly first, smile second, holding a basket at her side. Surprised, Loki rises to his feet.

“My prince,” she says, even though she has been told multiple times to call him by name. “I had heard you took ill, and I wished to bring you something to help.”

“Oh.” Loki blinked. “I. Hm. I will call for some tea.”

“Please, there’s no need,” Dagmar says. She gestures to the little table with its two chairs. “Do not exert yourself.”

“I believe that’s my line,” Loki says, and they share a private little smile. Loki folds himself gingerly into the chair.

“My turn to offer you company and a bit of cheer, I think.”

It defies logic, but somehow Loki’s eyes burn. Dagmar either doesn’t notice or is kind enough not to mention it when she sits down beside him and sets the basket on the table. Loki peers inside and sees only a cotton rag obscuring the contents. 

“I wanted to tell you so many times,” she says, and Loki looks up to meet her eyes. Her skin is luminous and her cheeks are flushed. “But I wasn’t telling anyone, not even Kjell, for fear that my efforts might be in vain.” She grinned then and squealed, pulling her shoulders up to her ears before buzzing in her seat like an electrified bee. Loki made an embarrassing, wordless grunt of inquiry. “But they’re here, Loki,” Dagmar says, and pulls away the cloth. “Look.”

Loki looks and the breath is stolen from him as if the basket itself had sucked it away. Nestled there were four small apples, red-gold and shining. They are no ordinary apples.

“Dagmar,” he says, and all other words dry up. He reaches for her treasures, tentative as if they may disappear.

“I know,” she says, and then laughs. “I _know_. I can hardly believe it myself.”

“How?” And Loki will be embarrassed later to have lost all his words, but for now there is only this: the apples and Dagmar, his disbelief and the touch of a home he’d lost. 

“I had the core of one fruit in my pocket when we ran,” she says. “I claimed a corner in one of the greenhouse wings of moderate temperature. I tended what I planted, and I…I hoped.”

Loki closes a hand over one apple. A knot gathers in his throat and the heat behind his eyes grows urgent. Dagmar reaches out and pauses before setting her hand on his shoulder and squeezing. 

“We Aesir are strong,” she says, “and we will not perish.”

“We.”

“Eat, Loki. Eat and shore up your strength.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Dagmar rises, only to bend to place a kiss on Loki’s head.

“Say nothing, Loki,” she says. “We take care of each other, do we not?”

Loki cannot speak. He nods tightly. Dagmar pats him on the shoulder.

“When you recover,” she says, “I have a favor to beg of you.”

“Anything.”

“It is Vidar, who lives next door.”

Loki forces himself to look up, though his vision blurs. Dagmar swipes at his cheekbone.

“He is a proud man,” she says. “Just like you. But like you, and the rest of us, he feels the burden of loss and solitude.”

“He has made his opinion of me clear,” Loki says.

Dagmar makes her ponderous way to the door and pauses in the jamb. With a smile she says,

“Pride and your furs will keep you warm at night.”

—

Flowers appear outside his door. Sweets and paintings and hand-wrought trinkets, too. The gifts pile high until Loki resorts to depositing them in a great mountain on Thor’s bunk. He doesn’t know who has left any of them, but he admires his pile with an emotion he cannot name.

The apples are crisp and sweet, full of juice. He saves two for Thor.

—

A day later and Thor has not returned, not even for sleep. Tension locks up Loki’s guts, his lungs, his heart, and propels him from his room to every corner of the ship in search of him.

“Haven’t seen him in weeks,” a butcher says. “Tell him he owes me three spoons.”

“Sorry, mate,” Korg says. “You just missed him. But Miek’s about to lay some eggs if you want to hang around and watch.”

“Try engineering,” the goldsmith says. “They’re always squabbling about fuel down there.”

“Have you checked the warm-weather crops?” the navigator asks. “There was recently a blight he was looking into.”

“Stop this and go ask Heimdall,” Brunnhilde says.

Thor is three steps ahead and Loki wonders when that happened. How long have they been on this ship? When did Loki lose himself to the narrow focus of the life they’ve cobbled together here?

He finds himself at Vidar’s door. An age passes between his knock and the creak of the door opening. In that age he plans it all: he will rummage in Vidar’s mind until he finds the answers he wants, he will leave the old man a simpering mess on the deck, he will swoop down on Thor, tie him like a hog before his slack-jawed subjects and reveal all the worst of Odin’s secrets until he begs for mercy and then, only then—

The door opens, and Loki and Vidar stare at each other unmoving, unblinking. Finally, Vidar steps aside and ushers him in.

“Dagmar sent you, I suppose,” he says. “Can’t leave well enough alone.”

“There are worse things to bear than a kindly neighbor who wishes only for your happiness,” Loki says.

Vidar smirks. 

“There’s Frigga’s boy,” he says. “You couldn’t hide him forever.”

Loki rolls his eyes and steps inside. Vidar has one of the few single bunks, cramped and windowless. The bulkheads are bare.

“What do you want?” Loki asks. “The view from your spire in the Halls of Knowledge? The southern valley in the flush of spring, perhaps, or the lowland hills during foaling.”

“Sit, princeling,” Vidar says, and herds him toward his table with its single seat. He sits opposite Loki on the edge of his bunk. “How does it work?”

“It’s a contained portal with distinct mathematical borders,” Loki says. “It is an art and a discipline and I could no more explain it in five minutes than you could summarize all the tomes under your care in a decade.”

Vidar throws his hands up and waves them in dismissal.

“Peace, majesty,” he says. “I inquire only about my part in the process of recreating my memories. You need not be so quick to draw first blood.”

Loki wants to sneer and dash Vidar’s mind from his head like seeds from a split pomegranate. But there is Thor, and Dagmar, and the coil of life inside her.

“You do nothing but remember the landscape that holds your heart,” Loki says instead. 

“Not—” Vidar clears his throat. “You can’t make it a person I see?” 

Loki sits back in the chair. Vidar looks small in the crush of his tiny quarters. His hair is lank, and his skin grey and mottled with age. Grief has taken from him what little vigor he may have had left.

“I could,” Loki says, and holds up a hand when Vidar’s head snaps up in a terrible hope. “But it would be uncanny, like a wax figure, or an automaton. It would be worse than—” Loki’s voice cracks. “It would be worse,” he finishes.

Vidar’s eyes fill with sympathy and Loki looks away. 

“My wife’s garden, then, when the honeysuckle was wild,” Vidar says. “But it can wait. There was something you wanted to know, when you came before. I should like to give it to you now, if I can.”

“There are many things I want to know,” Loki says. “I suspect my appetite is boundless.”

“A prioritized list to start out with, then,” Vidar says. “And if it falls outside the bounds of my knowledge, I will let you know with my apologies.”

“So solicitous in your time of need, Master Scholar,” Loki says, lip curled.

“No one need know, your majesty, that you accept aid without a fight. I can tell everyone you plundered my mind for it all, if you prefer. I confess I don’t think anyone would believe me.”

Loki whirls out of the chair and stands close enough to the bulkheads to feel their cool on his skin. He clenches his fists. The temperature falls.

“You should have been in theatre,” Vidar says, scoffing. Vidar stands to guide him back to the bunk where he is plunked down and handed a peach. Vidar pulls his chair up and settles into it. He looks Loki in the eye and straightens.

“Hela was born with fourteen teeth smeared with blood,” he says, and Loki cannot look away. “In birth, she took the life of her mother, Annar. She grew fat on milk and lifesblood, and Odin was proud. As she grew, so too did Odin grow into a bloodthirsty fatherhood: he wanted to see her adorned in gold and skins, he wanted to give her the branches of Yggdrasil and the roots besides, he wanted to know what he could accomplish with her at his side.

“First, they went to Vanaheim. They slaughtered the Vanir and took their beasts of burden, their fine-spun cloths, their women. 

“Then, they went to Alfheim. They put the light elves in chains and tore their crops from their roots, their children from their mothers’ arms. 

“Then, they went to Midgard, where the mortals worshiped them as gods, where they found the humans would subjugate themselves with little effort. On Midgard they gained an appetite for clean rains, companion animals, and veneration.”

Loki forces his hands not to shake around the peach, but Vidar keeps speaking as if he has forgotten Loki were present at all, eyes staring through all the fathomless millenia of his life.

“On Svartalfheim,” he says, “they cracked mountains for jewels and fuel, laid waste to all that gave nourishment, and Hela, in her rage and hunger, ate the dark elf armies whole.

“On Nidavelir, Hela’s horns began to grow bigger than Odin’s ambitions. Once young, the countless millenia of war had turned his beard white and his sight long. The dwarves defended their silver, their ore, their stones of fire, but Hela, no longer content only to plunder, tore their souls from their bodies and consumed them like Fenrir consumed bones.

“Next was Jötunheim.” 

Loki sucks in air as if he is drowning and leans forward. He is shaking. The peach rolls forgotten on the floor.

“A proud people, the Jötnar. Rich in the gifts of nature. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—I don’t know now if Hela knew how to admire something without seeking to destroy it, if she was ever capable of tempering her own desires, or if she was never really a person so much as a force. She took the seasons from the Jötnar and left them naught but darkness and ice, poverty and deprivation. And though Odin had grown weary of wielding Gungnir, he was all too pleased to gift Asgard with the labor, the goods, the plenty, and even the enironment of all that Hela had conquered in his name.

“The end came in Nilfheim, which had nothing but the ruins of a long-dead society standing half buried and smooth, blasted by wind and sand. Odin wished to turn back, to rest among all that they’d amassed in Asgard, among his own people. He wanted to find a new wife and see her dripping with jewels and dew. Hela turned on him—what more was there to see, to steal, to destroy? How could he be content until he’d burned the entirety of the tree of life to embers? Until all the glory that was possible to be had was not just Asgard’s, but his? Hers?

“The Valkyrie defended Odin against Hela’s revolt, but one by one they fell. Odin met Hela across the battlefield, his fiercest warriors reduced to a lifeless maze of bodies between them, and he walked toward her, stepping over those who had given their lives in service of a king who had yet to earn honor. She, believing she had won, grinned like a wolf-pup over her first kill, and held her hand out to her father. And Odin took that hand, only to trap her in Gungnir like a curse. He poured all the strength of his own magics onto the geas on her prison there, and bound it with his very life.

“Odin turned home, alone and reticent, and thus he became Odin All-Father, the great and wise king who sought peace before war. But it was to a gilded palace he returned, a prosperous people and a fertile land, and I am not certain he ever paused to consider that all his riches were limned in blood.”

Vidar’s gaze snaps sharp and wide to Loki’s.

“You’re shaking.”

“Keep going,” Loki says. 

“You asked me who Hela was,” Vidar says. “And the only answer I have is that she was the end of us.”

Loki stands and goes once more to the widest, emptiest bulkhead. He stretches his neck and cracks the discomfort from his spine.

“No she wasn’t,” he says. He lifts his hands and closes his eyes. Energy swirls between his spread hands. “Tell me about your wife’s garden,” he says.

—

Loki wishes for nothing more than to sleep for days, maybe years. But he drags himself to the quarters of the man he’s been avoiding for, seemingly, his entire life.

Heimdall stares at him.

“You could act surprised to see me,” Loki says. Heimdall is silent. “Pleased? Overjoyed?”

“What is it, your majesty?” 

“Are we not past formality by now, Heimdall?”

“I am never past formality.”

“Ah.”

“State your purpose or I shall go back to sleep,” Heimdall says.

“Let me in,” Loki says. A crack in Heimdall’s expression reveals irritation, but he stands aside, and Loki sweeps in only to whirl on him as the door shuts behind him. “You owe me answers, Guardian.” 

Loki expects a protest, or flat-out refusal, or, at the very least, quiet intimidation. He looks forward to the fight.

Instead, Heimdall says, “There have been many secrets. Perhaps it is time to be plain.”

Loki stills and straightens. 

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, let us be plain.”

“Ask, prince.”

“What…what is the season of plenty? Why not reproduce in the normal fashion?”

Heimdall cocks his head.

“You realize normality is unique to each creature, each context? A Jötunn might well visit Asgard and ask why we reproduce in so bizarre a manner, with such strictures placed upon our beings.”

Loki snorts and brings his hands together in a single clap. 

“I thought we were speaking plain,” he says.

“I cannot be responsible for the fact that your knowledge of realms and peoples outside your own are so lacking.”

“I am _asking_ about my people!” Loki’s voice reverberates between the bulkheads. “Why did Odin bring me here? Why did he change my appearance and raise me to despise what I am? How could he hate a helpless babe that much?” His breath somes quick and harsh as Heimdall stares straight into the depths of him with those leonine eyes. 

“Odin was an imperfect king,” Heimdall says at last. “What he crushed with one hand he cradled in the other. He was sentimental, and you were his spoils of war.”

Loki closes his eyes and forces stillness into his quaking lungs.

“Heimdall,” he says. “Please.”

In two strides, Heimdell brushes past and takes his sword off the wall. He produces a rag and polish, and he sits on the edge of his bunk to clean it. He does not look at Loki all the while.

“You likely came into the season of plenty due to your close association with the woman Dagmar,” he says. “The Aesir adhere to boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, even if either or both terms are frequently inadequate. The Jötnar, in contrast, have no concept of the masculine and the feminine at all. Their bodies appear, to the Aesir eye, as if they have all been cut from the same cloth. Only the season of plenty differentiates them enough to reproduce, and only internally. Who could have known that your body would react as it did?”

“Odin’s magics,” Loki says. “They’ve lasted beyond his entrance to Valhalla. It is a geas I cannot break.” 

Heimdall sets the sword in his lap and contemplates it for a moment before raising his eyes to meet Loki’s.

“Still you misunderstand,” he says. “At this point I must conclude it is deliberate.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t.”

Heimdall stands, the sword cast aside. Loki cannot meet his gaze. 

“He would,” Heimdall says. “He did. He took you because you were his responsibility. He took you because he couldn’t bear to see you killed by an enemy he conquered in every way imaginable. He took you because he loved you, Loki Odinson.”

Loki stabs Heimdall. Heimdall forgives him.

—

Thor is there when Loki returns to their quarters deep into ship’s night. His lone eye is huge as if in fear, but Loki is boneless and bloodless and sinks into his bunk like a shade.

“Where have you been?” he asks, quiet.

“I thought to give you your space.”

Loki snorts. 

“A Midgardian sentiment if ever I heard one.”

“You were not in your right mind,” Thor says. “I thought you would be angry, and I couldn’t bear it, Loki.”

Loki shakes his head. He has always wanted Thor, it seems. From the first germ of memory, he has wanted Thor: his attention, his affection, his interest. The manner of his desire and devotion has evolved, but never wavered. He can admit that now. He has nothing left to him but the truth of all that he’s done and why. Yes, he has always wanted Thor, and he always will. 

He lifts one hand in invitation, and Thor crowds into his bunk with him, sets his forehead on Loki’s own, cups Loki’s jaw.

“Brother,” Loki murmurs, and Thor groans against his mouth, bucks against his hips.

Thor knows, Loki realizes. Thor knows and wants him anyway.

—

“I know why you take us to Midgard,” Loki says, after. Thor shifts enough to peer at him, his mouth set in a line.

“We owe them,” Thor says.

“We owe all the realms,” Loki says. 

“Some have recovered and prosper now, like Vanaheim and Alfheim,” Thor says. “And some never will, like Svartalfheim and Nidavelir. But Midgard…”

“In Midgard we can be of service.”

Thor nods, tightening his arm behind Loki’s back.

“We can be of service,” he says. “And we can live in peace. They will allow us that, and I am selfish enough to want it.”

Loki closes his eyes. Thor’s scent his heavy on him, and it only makes his blood pump faster. He hopes the next season of plenty does not tarry.

—

Dagmar’s child is born—a girl she and Kjell name Ylva. When she is placed in Loki’s arms, he raises his eyes to the window he made and sees the sun casting long shadows in the orchards, the stars just beginning to glitter in the spill of violet above the trees. Ylva will know Asgard only in stories, and only as an illusion, but Loki promises himself that hers will be a future without lies. Hers will be a clear gaze.

Thor is frenzied that night, as if just the wanting could germinate life in a barren land. When he succumbs to sleep, and Loki is full of him and languorous, Loki rises and turns on a dim light. He sits, leaking into his nightclothes with satisfaction, and turns to the first page of his notebook. It was a gift from the artisans who began bookbinding when there was enough plant pulp for pages and boarskin for covers. It has sat in a drawer for long months, waiting for something worthy.

Loki brandishes a pen in anticipation. The paper is thick and uneven, but in their blank expanses Loki sees only possibility. He sets the point to the page.

_The History of the Aesir_

 

**End**


End file.
